Offensive Squid

Post edited 3:11 am – October 11, 2011 by laranzu

Can't think where else to post this so…

No, not State of Grace/Dumbspeech/whatever the title is this month. It's "Crysis: Legion" the official adaptation of the computer game Crysis 2, which Peter himself mentioned as "war porn" on his official blog.

Yeah, it's based on a game. So what? It's just another shared world setting, which isn't beneath other Hugo winners such as George Martin or CJ Cherryh. Hell, Greg Bear just wrote a novel set in the Halo universe. And I personally haven't played the game or its predecessor, so I'm judging it purely as a book.

The writing style is typical Watts. Told first person by the protagonist, in present tense although in the book he is being debriefed. It's very detailed, for reasons which are neatly worked into the story as it progresses. There are also a number of memos and transcripts to bring in side plots and the occasional infodump without switching to another character POV.

All the usual themes are present. Amoral corporations, ineffective governments, weird biology, nature of consciousness and free will, brain and personality changes and implications for the self. The aliens, as in Blindsight, are really alien, not just humanoids with latex face masks. Oh, and there's a tsunami.

What is different is the pacing. It's a 315 page trade paperback and the action is absolutely non-stop from start to finish – imagine the entire Rifters series compressed into one book. This does mean though that considerations of consciousness and other weighty topics take back seat to blowing shit up. The body count is higher than Blindsight, but lower than Starfish.

Is it war porn? Hardly. By the standards of most military science fiction, there is a shocking lack of detail about weaponry. Why, even the protagonist doesn't seem to know what the calibre of a Grendel assault rifle is, or the maximum effective range of a JAW launcher!

It's not Peter Watts at his best, and isn't going to win a Hugo. But it's not a sellout either. If you don't mind military science fiction, it's a good read. If you don't like military science fiction but have friends who do, buy it as a gift and broaden their minds a bit.